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>I'll tell you the reason: incentives. The kids are learning by social osmosis that status is gained by athletic achievement, not by mathematical achievement.
by alex_c 18y ago
>I'll tell you the reason: incentives. The kids are learning by social osmosis that status is gained by athletic achievement, not by mathematical achievement.
You're just rephrasing the problem, though. WHY do certain societies give more status to athletic rather than to mathematical achievement, relative to other societies?
- jcl 18y agoProbably for the same reasons we have more televised athletic tournaments than televised math tournaments. They are visual, more visceral, easier for a non-participant to judge. Athletes are seen as healthier, more social, and more sexually attractive. Athletic competitions represent our desire to successfully compete in these attributes.
- nazgulnarsil 18y agoexactly. humans are adaptation executers, not fitness maximizers. we are adapted to measure the metric of success by physical prowess because in the environment we evolved in that WAS the most important metric for success. Our monkey brains can not wrap our heads around the idea that something like sitting in a class room playing with numbers would be a better predictor of success.
- jcl 18y agoPhysical fitness is also a much easier metric to estimate visually, and we are lazy, visual creatures. We like to make snap judgments and rationalize them later.